Through applique and embroidery, the quilt at Woodridge's public library tells visitors this is a village that is proud of its diversity. Its brightly colored squares depict flags and faces from far-away places such as Bolivia, Ghana, India, Jamaica, Poland and Serbia.

Woodridge has no Main Street or 19th century gingerbread houses. It is not a tidy square with a downtown at its center. On paper, it resembles a seahorse, with leafy appendages linked only by transparent skin.

In its short history, though, the 51-year-old village has evolved into a community where residents join arms to form a safety net for their children.

Named for a ridge, not for East Coast towns of the same name, Woodridge includes parts of DuPage and Will counties, plus a sliver of Cook. The farmers who settled this area are gone, but many of their names — including Goodrich, Greene and Nadelhoffer — live on as the names of schools and streets.

Woodridge is no longer the tiny place that Alice Aubele recalls from the 1960s, when her 2-year-old son Richie got a ride home in a police car after wandering off, even though he could only tell the officer his name was "Wichie."

"The officer said he looked like an Aubele, and he knew where we lived," said Aubele.

Nor is it as cozy as it was when former Police Chief Joel Kagann earned a sore arm from waving to the kids who knew him by name in his one-square-mile domain.

"Then, the worst crime was when the big boys chased the little boys off the skating rink," Kagann said.

Today, Woodridge consists of 9.4 square but disjointed miles. Its nearly 36,000 people are a mix of newcomers and natives. The police blotter has worsened to include retail theft and drunken driving, but violent crime remains rare.

The village compensated for its lack of a downtown by creating the Town Centre at the seahorse's heart. It includes the Village Hall, library, post office, public works facility and Police Department.

At the village's southern tail is the 850-acre Internationale Centre business park, which employs about 3,500 people. With Woodridge's growing collection of retailers and restaurants, the Centre has helped the village decrease its municipal tax rate every year for 24 years.

The rest of the village is a medley of residential and commercial developments. Compared with other suburbs of its size, Woodridge has a greater share (50 percent) of multifamily housing.

Woodridge's single-family houses include some 1950s ranches plus lots of 1970s and 1980s raised ranches and tri-levels. Houses built since 1990 make up the village's two-story, higher-priced houses.

"In the most prestigious neighborhoods such as Seven Bridges, houses run from the high $400,000s to about $750,000," said Ron Rose, owner of Rose Realty in Woodridge and a real estate developer. "But at the other end, you can get a one-bedroom condo for under $100,000."

Woodridge has worked hard to minimize devaluation of its properties during the recession, Rose added.

"The magic here is the village's aggressive planning for the future," he said. "It is pro-development. It encourages new businesses and encourages the remodeling of houses that need work."

"Compared to other towns in DuPage County, you get more for your money here," said Mayor William Murphy, a retired educator who has been Woodridge's leader for 30 years.

Like Aubele, he and his wife downsized from their family home after they became empty nesters.

One of Murphy's goals has been enforcement of property maintenance codes.

"Residents want that," he said. "When someone doesn't keep up, it affects the value of everyone's property." Instead of opposition, he gets the occasional call from "a wife who thanks us because she's been trying to get her husband to finish painting the house."

Murphy has maintained Woodridge's tradition of community input. Village officials encourage residents to speak up at neighborhood "dialogue meetings" and the annual town meeting.

Another goal of Murphy's has been the development of recreational space. As builders turned former farms into housing developments and office parks, the village developed 655 acres of parks.

Twenty miles of bike paths link Woodridge's neighborhoods with its surrounding communities and forest preserves. In addition to giving children access to their friends' houses, the paths give many adults a green route to work.

The biggies on Woodridge's festival schedule are its annual Jubilee and its Cultural Fest, which were combined this year to limit village expenditures. On Sunday, the 11th annual Mini Triathlon will kick off at the Cypress Cove Family Aquatic Park, which is the summer hot spot for Woodridge kids. In October, the park district's Hawthorne Hill Woods becomes a haunted forest.

"There's plenty to do here," said Amit Choksi, who bought his second Woodridge house in the Noble Woods development with his wife, Bhakti, because their family grew to include a son. "We're close to shopping, an IMAX theater, parks and lots of places to eat."

Like many of their high-school friends, the Choksis returned to Woodridge to raise their family after living the single life in Chicago.

"We have lots of kids in the neighborhood, like we did when we grew up," Choksi said. "They can walk to elementary school. That's important to us."

Weekends, the Choksis meet old friends for drinks at the Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery or sample the Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Mexican or Thai cuisine at Woodridge's ethnic restaurants.

The village's dissecting by Interstate Highway 355 in 1989 was a "game-changer," Choksi said. "It made Woodridge accessible to jobs all over the area," he said.

Tucked into Woodridge's neighborhoods are its public and private elementary and middle schools. Woodridge is part of eight school districts, so home buyers should study boundary maps. Most of its high-schoolers go to Downers Grove South High School or Downers Grove North High School, but some go to high school in Naperville or Lemont.

As Woodridge annexes the last of the surrounding undeveloped land, the village plans to increase its share of senior housing to accommodate people like Aubele, who said she appreciates the senior-friendly amenities like underground parking at her Farmingdale Village building.

Now a mature suburb, Woodridge is a mix of empty nesters and young families like the Choksis who are building memories for their children.

"It's not a small town anymore," Aubele said. "You don't know everyone's name anymore. Now, it's bustling. It's bigger. But at events like the fireworks, it's three generations. My (grown) kids meet their old friends. And they bring their kids."

A burst of thunderstorm activity across the Chicago-area in mid-afternoon Sunday resulted in multiple injuries and a death at an event in west suburban Wood Dale, the collapse of a dome in northwest suburban Rosemont and the temporary evacuation of the music festival Lollapalooza in Grant Park...